While AMD announced its Ryzen 6000 mobile processors earlier this year, now it’s time for its Ryzen PRO 6000 chips, which are being announced today. The company is calling them the world’s most advanced processors for business laptops, which is a bold claim as these stand up against Intel’s 12th-gen vPro chips.
First of all, AMD talked up performance a lot. It’s worth noting that a lot of this stuff isn’t particularly new, because the performance should be pretty comparable to the consumer parts. In fact, we’ve has laptops announced with these chips since CES, with Lenovo’s new ThinkPad Z-series. Any business laptop that uses AMD Ryzen processors should have PRO variants.
AMD is promising best-in-class performance with Ryzen PRO 6000
Specifically, the new processors announced today include Ryzen 6000 H, Ryzen 6000 U, and refresh SKUs of Ryzen 5000 U. The Ryzen PRO 6000 chips are built on the new Zen 3+ architecture, which uses a 6nm node and promises up to 30% faster CPU performance. Also, with RDNA 2 graphics, AMD is promising up to double the graphics performance.
Speaking on performance, AMD took the time to compare its U-series processors, which are typically 15W can be scaled up to a 30W TDP, and lined them up against Intel’s new 28W P-series chips. It’s claiming wins in Cinebench R23 multithreaded performance, graphics, Passmark 10, PCMark 10, PCMark 10 Extended, and PCMark 10 Productivity. Intel still takes the win in Cinebench R23 single-core, which isn’t much of a surprise given how well Intel does in single-core benchmarks.
It’s not just performance either. AMD is promising best-in-class battery life. Using MobileMark 2018 on an HP EliteBook 865 G9, which has a Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U and a 76WHr battery, it came up with 26.15 hours. On an HP EliteBook x360 1040 G8 with a Core i7-1165G7 and a 78WHr batter, it scored 22.25 hours. With the same processor, it’s promising up to 29 hours of video playback, and up to 45% better battery life in Teams calls when compared to an Intel Core i7-1260P.
With great PRO comes great security
AMD Ryzen PRO 6000 is the first x86 processor family to have Microsoft Pluton built into it, which is a big deal. The only other place we’ve seen it so far is in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chipset. Pluton does a number of things, including protecting against physical attacks, but it also provides tight integration between the hardware and the software. This was something that’s already been used in Xbox consoles for a while, and you might recall that AMD makes the chips that goes in those as well.
Along with security features is also manageability features, such as support for Windows Autopilot, which lets admins quickly and easily set up new Windows devices. Also, as you’d expect, there’s support for modern management solutions like Microsoft Endpoint Manager. The firm is also promising 18 months of planned software stability, 24 months of planned availability, and better QA + Validation, all things that are super-important when businesses are going to choose what kind of processor to go for.
There are lots of laptops already announced with these new processors. You’ll find Ryzen PRO 6000 in HP EliteBook 800 G9, Lenovo ThinkPad Z-series, and ThinkPad T-series. You’ll find Ryzen PRO 5000 chips in HP EliteBook 600 G9, ProBook 400 G9, and HP 200 G9, along with Lenovo ThinkPad L-series, ThinkPad E-series, V-series, and ThinkBook. AMD didn’t confirm partners besides HP and Lenovo, although it did say that others are coming.
